If Discover is hiding fees in your bill, you may have legal options.
Discover Financial Services is a company that owns and operates Discover Bank. With Discover you can get checking accounts, savings accounts, student loans, personal loans, home equity loans, and even credit cards. With so many financial services available, it’s easy to make mistakes, and sometimes that’s precisely what happens. When looking at your Discover statement, you might find hidden fees that don’t quite make sense. But what can you do?
Start by understanding what fees might be charged to your account at any given time. There might be an unexpected fee, but it’s for a perfectly legitimate reason. However, there might be times when there is a mistake, and you just need customer service to fix it.
With the Discover savings account, you don’t have any monthly fees, insufficient funds fees, minimum deposit requirements, and you earn interest on any money in your account. Discover does not charge fees for excessive withdrawals, deposited item returns, official bank checks, expedited delivery, stop payment orders, or closing your account. You really shouldn’t find any unexpected fees in your statement with all of that.
Discover made the news because they have done away with all fees that you typically find with a checking account. The Discover checking account is not much different. There’s no fee for insufficient funds, withdrawals at Discover ATMs, replacement debit cards, online bill pay, expedited delivery for replacement cards, stop payment orders, account closure, monthly maintenance, insufficient funds, or checks.
Discover credit cards have variable interest rates depending on your credit score, and many of them have an introductory 0% interest rate. So, if you sign up with a credit card that has no interest for the first 15 months, you might see interest charges on month 16 and mistake them for hidden fees in your Discover statement. Other than that, fees include cash advances and late payments.
If you have a student loan through Discover, you might find your interest rate changes over time if you have a variable interest rate loan. You will see a different index rate on your statement every quarter when this happens. This means changes to the number of payments you have to make or the amount you have to make. Aside from that, you might see late fees if you don’t make your payment on time.
If you find an incorrect fee on your Discover statement, you must contact Discover customer service first. They should be able to help you reverse an incorrect charge or explain why it is there. If not, you might be able to file a complaint against Discover. This doesn’t necessarily resolve your problem, but it gets your issue heard. Your user agreement probably prevents you from joining existing Discover lawsuits, but you still have two legal options:
Small claims court is usually an option in your user agreement as an alternative to regular Discover lawsuits. Every state has different limits on the type of compensation you can get, so your case might not qualify, but if it does and you have the time and money to go back and forth to your local court and file the paperwork yourself, it can be a great option.
If you want something a bit easier with fewer restrictions and might be a better way to get the type of compensation you want, consider consumer arbitration. Consumer arbitration is a legally-binding alternative without the same limitations that is usually faster and easier.
Share your complaint about Discover with FairShake today.
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